The 37th annual meeting of GLOW will be hosted by CRISSP, a research center of KU Leuven HUBrussel. The GLOW Phonology workshop will take place in Brussels (Belgium) on April 5, 2014. Its theme is ‘Phonological Specification and Interface Interpretation’.

The primitives of phonological theory - whether we call them features, elements, gestures, or some other name - stand in some relation to phonetic reality. Although there is consensus about this, there does not seem to be much agreement about specifics, such as how many primitives there are, whether they are privative or binary, and whether all segments need to be specified for all of them. In this workshop we aim to bring together phonologists working in different traditions to discuss how some of the most pressing issues are to be resolved.

The first issue is the nature of the relationship between phonological primitives and phonetics. As far as we can see, there are roughly three options: one can either assume that the primitives represent elements of articulation (as in most feature theories or in Articulatory Phonology); or elements of acoustics (as in Element Theory). Or is the mainstream view incorrect, in that phonological primitives bear no direct relationship to phonetics at all (as in Substance-Free Phonology)?

The second issue is to what extent the primitives of phonological representation can also be manipulated by modules outside of ‘phonology proper’, such as ‘phonetic implementation’ or ‘sociolinguistics’. More specifically, does phonetic implementation only add gradient detail to the phonological output representation, or can it also add additional ‘phonological’ objects?

The third question, related to the previous one, is whether we have to distinguish between different ‘levels’ of phonological representation, each spelling out more or less detail - in other words, whether there is ‘underspecification’ at the lower levels of phonology (and perhaps also in the phonetics), how this is determined, and what evidence we have for such underspecification beyond theoretical elegance.

The final question is to what extent the ‘primitives’ of phonological theory are really atomic, or whether they have some internal structure. There are several types of substructure that come to mind; e.g. binary features crucially distinguish an attribute and a value; but one could also wonder whether the uniform behaviour of e.g. ‘Place’ features (or ‘Colour’ elements) in some phonological processes is not really an indication of their sharing some internal structure.

The questions outlined above are fundamental and in many cases quite old, and we would particularly invite abstracts which aim at a principled discussion of these debates in light of recent experimental, computational or theoretical work. Presentations will be 25 minutes long plus 10 minutes of discussion.

Abstract Submission Guidelines:

- Abstracts must not exceed two A4 pages in length (including data and references), have one inch (2.5 cm) margins on all sides, and be set in Times New Roman with a font size no smaller than 12pt and single line spacing.- Examples must be integrated into the text of the abstract, rather than collected at the end.- Nothing in the abstract, the title, or the name of the document should identify the author(s).- At most two submissions per author, at most one of which can be single-authored. The same abstract may not be submitted to both the main colloquium and a workshop.- Only submissions in pdf-format will be accepted.- Abstracts are submitted via the GLOW 37 EasyChair page: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=glow37.